Fitness Friday – Get Paid to Exercise!

~300 words, ~2 min read time

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Fitness Friday – honestly, I’ve not had much to say about it, so I decided not to.

Anyway, this week, I’ve had the pleasure at being at Mises University. This is always a fantastic time to connect with other Austrian economists and students of Austrian economics. I was chatting with another of the faculty members, and he was asking if I knew some of the other Austrian or Austrian-influenced economists that graduated from Ohio State. There’s one that works about an hour from me, it turns out, who I had met once before, about 7 or 8 years ago. Anyway, I decided to look him up to see what his current research is. Most of it is empirical stuff (probably why I haven’t seen him in Austrian circles) now, and this paper jumped out at me.

It turns out that exercise does pay. In fact, regular exercise provides something like a 6-10% boost in your wage. Now, we might be tempted to try to explain this away as a result of effects on things like obesity. We know that obesity has negative effects on earnings. So, maybe exercise pays off because people that exercise are somewhat less likely to be obese.

Turns out that’s not the explanation. The study controlled for the effects of body composition.

In other words, regular exercise itself – even if you don’t see “results” in terms of weight, body composition, etc. – seems to have a significant impact on your wages.